FirESmart: Nature-based solutions for preventive fire management and sustained supply of ecosystem services
The impact of extreme fire events is expected to increase in the near future across Southern Europe landscapes due to increasing effects of global climate change and regional land-abandonment and large-scale reforestation programs. Current fire management policies are mostly focused on suppression and ignore land management issues, which may paradoxically accelerate the transition to more flammable and fire-prone landscapes. FirESmart aims to reduce fire damage while ensuring biodiversity conservation and the delivery of ecosystem services, by integrating both ecological and socio-economic dimensions of the wildfire problem under a socio-ecological narrative and framework.
Concretely, the project will intend to answer the following two questions:
1) Will fire-smart landscape management reduce fire damage in the future under any combination of climate change and fire-suppression scenarios?
2) Is fire-smart landscape management compatible with biodiversity conservation and the supply of ecosystem services, and thus, with viable and societally valued rural economies?
FirESmart will fundamentally aim to improve the scientific knowledge on how management scenarios can be used to connect socio-economic and ecological systems and to better inform policy-makers and local stakeholders on fire and land-use management in fire-prone systems largely affected by rural depopulation. Also, it will have practical relevance in terms of testing fire-smart management measures inspired/supported by nature, compatible with rural bioeconomy paradigms, and feeding into ongoing policy reforms in the fire, land use and ecosystem services areas.
Project website: https://firesmartproject.wordpress.com/
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/firesmartproj
Twitter: https://twitter.com/FirESmart_proj
Andrea Duane, Angelo Sil, João C. Azevedo, João A. Santos, Julia Touza, Lluís Brotons, María Chas-Amil, Núria Aquilué, Paulo M. Fernandes, Sara Rodrigues, Silvana Pais, Virgilio Hermoso